Professor Nilanjan Banerjee's Introduction to Mobile Computing class will hold a poster and demonstration session showcasing student class projects from 12:30 to 2:00 on Tuesday, May 14 in room 210 of the ITE building. The projects inlcude mobile apps, games, and systems that have built during the semester.  Pizza will be served.

The course was partially sponsored this year by Microsoft Research's Hawaii Initiative, which provided students with hardware and access to cloud services for storage, computing and data.

Anyone who is interested in mobile technology is welcome to attend and intereact with Professor Banerjee and the students, who include both upper-level undergraduates and graduate students. See the event flyer for more information.

Here are the systems that will be demonstrated:

• Food Life-cycle Manager: Reduce food waste, Save your money
• Home Guard: The easiest way to protect your home from anywhere without compromise
• JUMP: Keep Jumping up
• DIY Picture Dictionary: making learning Fun Multiple Places Near you Trackit: Anytime anywhere
• SpotOrNot: A crowdsourced parking app for UMBC
• Build-A-Bill: An easy to use bill splitting app (even after you've had a few drinks)
• Pocket Philosopher: What would YOU do?
• Golf score browser
• Math Path
• Community: Share whats on your mind 
• System Android Powered Telepresence: Accessible and Low-cost Telepresence with Android
• Beat Box: tap and mix your musical mind
• PillNote: Capturing user's interaction with medication
• YASLA (Yet Another Shopping List App): app that saves the day by saving your lists and suggesting stores.

For more information, contact Prof. Banerjee at nilanb at umbc.edu.

Ph.D. Dissertation Proposal

A Rapidly Deployable Image
Classification System Using Multi-Views

Adrian Rosebrock

11:00am Friday, 10 May, ITE 325, UMBC

Constructing an image classification system using strong, local invariant descriptors is time consuming and tedious, requiring many experimentations and parameter tuning to obtain an adequately performing model. Furthermore, training a system in a given domain and then migrating the model to a separate domain will likely yield poor performance. As computer vision systems become more prevalent in the academic, government, and private sectors, it is paramount that a framework to more easily construct these classification systems be created. In this work we present a rapidly deployable image classification system using multi-views, where each view consists of a set of weak global features. These weak global descriptors are computationally simple to extract, intuitive to understand, and require substantially less parameter tuning than their local invariant counterparts. We demonstrate that by combining weak features with ensemble methods we are able to outperform the current state-of-the-art methods or achieve comparable accuracy. Finally, we provide a theoretical justification for our ensemble framework that can be used to construct rapidly deployable image classification systems called "Ecosembles".

Committee: Dr. Tim Oates (chair), Dr. Jesus Caban, Dr. Tim Finin, Dr. Charles Nicholas

CSEE graduate student Asmita Korde will present a paper on her research with Professor Tinoosh Mohsenin tomorrow at the the SPIE Defense Security and Sensing Conference in the Baltimore Convention Center. Asmita was a UMBC CWIT Scholar and received a BS degree in Computer Engineering in 2011. She is now finishing her MS degree at UMBC in the Electrical Engineering program.

Her paper, Detection Performance of Radar Compressive Sensing in Noisy Environments, describes research done in collaboration with her mentor, Tinoosh Mohsenin, and Damon Bradley of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.

Here is the abstract.

In this paper, radar detection via compressive sensing is explored. Compressive sensing is a new theory of sampling which allows the reconstruction of a sparse signal by sampling at a much lower rate than the Nyquist rate. By using this technique in radar, the use of matched filter can be eliminated and high rate sampling can be replaced with low rate sampling. In this paper, compressive sensing is analyzed by applying varying factors such as noise and different measurement matrices. Different reconstruction algorithms are compared by generating ROC curves to determine their detection performance. We conduct simulations for a 64-length signal with 3 targets to determine the effectiveness of each algorithm in varying SNR. We also propose a simplified version of Orthogonal Matching Pursuit (OMP). Through numerous simulations, we _nd that a simplified version of Orthogonal Matching Pursuit (OMP), can give better results than the original OMP in noisy environments when sparsity is highly over estimated, but does not work as well for low noise environments.

The UMBC Office of Institutional Advancement has extended its search for a Web Designer/Specialist. The incumbent will take an active role in the department’s website development. Specific duties include: performing hands-on web/interactive design, print and production work; developing and delivering projects in a timely manner; and performing other duties as assigned.

This is an entry-level position that requires a Bachelor's degree in web design, graphic design or related area. One year of professional experience in design, development and production of interactive marketing communications preferred. Proficiency in HTML5, CSS, Adobe Creative Suite, MS Office, mobile/responsive web design, browser compatibility and accessibility standards required. A working knowledge of JavaScript, JQuery, PHP, WordPress, Final Cut Pro, interactive charts and graphs, blogs, wikis, social media, analytics, HTML emails, and user interface design desired. Experience with higher education and/or a digital/creative agency a plus. Additionally, the ideal candidate will be a team player, positive self-starter and detail-oriented designer who is able to produce work that is current and polished. He or she should enjoy working with clients, have a sincere desire to help meet their communications goals, and be able to assess strategies to help create the most effective and responsive digital communications. The ideal candidate must also have the ability to learn new skills independently, work within the development cycle for complex web initiatives, and manage time to meet aggressive deadlines.

For best consideration, submit a cover letter including salary requirements, resume, and three non-returnable samples and/or URLs by May 10, 2013 (resumes will be accepted until filled) to: UMBC Creative Services, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, Administration Building, 8th floor, 1000 Hilltop Circle, Baltimore, MD 21250, ATTN: Design Director, Email: Sorry, you need javascript to view this email address.

The UMBC Office of Institutional Advancement has extended its search for a Web Designer/Specialist. The incumbent will take an active role in the department’s website development. Specific duties include: performing hands-on web/interactive design, print and production work; developing and delivering projects in a timely manner; and performing other duties as assigned.

This is an entry-level position that requires a Bachelor's degree in web design, graphic design or related area. One year of professional experience in design, development and production of interactive marketing communications preferred. Proficiency in HTML5, CSS, Adobe Creative Suite, MS Office, mobile/responsive web design, browser compatibility and accessibility standards required. A working knowledge of JavaScript, JQuery, PHP, WordPress, Final Cut Pro, interactive charts and graphs, blogs, wikis, social media, analytics, HTML emails, and user interface design desired. Experience with higher education and/or a digital/creative agency a plus. Additionally, the ideal candidate will be a team player, positive self-starter and detail-oriented designer who is able to produce work that is current and polished. He or she should enjoy working with clients, have a sincere desire to help meet their communications goals, and be able to assess strategies to help create the most effective and responsive digital communications. The ideal candidate must also have the ability to learn new skills independently, work within the development cycle for complex web initiatives, and manage time to meet aggressive deadlines.

For best consideration, submit a cover letter including salary requirements, resume, and three non-returnable samples and/or URLs by May 10, 2013 (resumes will be accepted until filled) to: UMBC Creative Services, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, Administration Building, 8th floor, 1000 Hilltop Circle, Baltimore, MD 21250, ATTN: Design Director, Email: Sorry, you need javascript to view this email address.

Baltimore Students for Startups is a community service project that connect local startups and fast growth companies with talented students looking for internships. Their first event was a success so they are hosting another Intern Match Event for web, graphic, and print design students including other majors.

The event will take place from 6:00pm-9:00pm on Thursday May 2, 2013 at

Johns Hopkins Carey Business School – Harbor East Campus
100 International Drive
Baltimore, MD 21202

Food and drinks will be served. There is plenty of available street and garage parking. The tentative agenda is as follows.

5:30pm Doors Open
6:00pm Orientation
6:15pm-8:45pm Pitch/Match session, delicious refreshments, interviews
9:00pm: event concludes

Interested students should RSVP by May 1st at 2pm.

Baltimore Students for Startups is a community service project that connect local startups and fast growth companies with talented students looking for internships. Their first event was a success so they are hosting another Intern Match Event for web, graphic, and print design students including other majors.

The event will take place from 6:00pm-9:00pm on Thursday May 2, 2013 at

Johns Hopkins Carey Business School – Harbor East Campus
100 International Drive
Baltimore, MD 21202

Food and drinks will be served. There is plenty of available street and garage parking. The tentative agenda is as follows.

5:30pm Doors Open
6:00pm Orientation
6:15pm-8:45pm Pitch/Match session, delicious refreshments, interviews
9:00pm: event concludes

Interested students should RSVP by May 1st at 2pm.

The UMBC Review is a journal for undergraduate research done at UMBC. CMSC and CMPE majors who have recently finished a research project or paper or plan to do so before the fall should consider submitting it for volume 15, which will be published next April. The Review publishes papers in all disciplines, including the computing sciences.

Papers may be submitted at any time between now and 13 September 2013 for consideration in the next volume. Students graduating this spring or summer are eligible to submit papers on work completed as an undergraduate. See the table of contents of the current issue to get an idea of the range and length of published papers.

If you are interested, fill out this online form to get additional information.

Congratulations to Omar Shehab (CS Ph.D.), who has been awarded two NSF travel grants to attend research conferences this June.

First, Omar has received an NSF travel grant to attend the IEEE Conference on Computational Complexity. The conference celebrates research in all areas of computation complexity theory, taking a look at the absolute and relative power of computational models under resource constraints. Specific topics include probalistic and interactive proof systems, proof complexity, and descriptive complexity. The conference will be held in Palo Alto California, June 5-7.

Omar has also received an NSF travel grant to attend the 45^th ACM Symposium on the Theory of Computing (STOC 2013). Here, he will be presenting a poster entited: "Hamiltonian complexity of Trefoil knot transformations." The conference is sponsored by the ACM Special Interest Group on Algorithms and Computation Theory (SIGACT). It will explore original research on the theory of computation. The conference will be held in Palo Alto California, June 1-4.

Omar started UMBC’s Computer Science Ph.D. program in 2010. He is currently pursuing research under the supervision of Dr. Samuel J. Lomonaco Jr. Omar’s doctoral work exlpores adiabatic quantum Hamiltonian complexity, quantum computational simulation of topology and use of quantum optics to understand device independent cryptography. He is currently a Teaching Assistant for CMSC 641: Design and Analysis of Algorithms.

The Advanced Technology Lab at the Samsung R&D Center San Jose, CA is offering research internship positions for qualified PhD students. Responsibilities will include:

• Working with a team of experienced researchers to devise innovative and practical solutions to extract opinions and emotions from text for question answering and recommender systems.
• Implementing the solutions as working prototypes.

The qualified candidate will possess knowledge and experience in one or more of the following areas:

• Machine learning and statistical text mining for social media data such as Twitter and user reviews.
• Sentiment Analysis
• Information retrieval techniques and software including Elasticsearch.
• Document summarization techniques.

Experience in Java is required. Familiarity with JavaScript is a plus. PhD candidates in computer science, electrical engineering, or related fields are preferred.

Samsung R&D emphasizes an "Innovation through passion" philosophy and thrives in a fast-pace, results-driven environment. Team members will proactively participate in internal collaborations and constructive engagement with the academic and research community. Interns will work with a dynamic and passionate group of top-class scientists and engineers with a broad spectrum of research skills: semantic web, machine learning, social network analysis, big data and data analytics. We also encourage interns to publish research result at reputable venues.

Interested candidates should send their resume to Justin Martineau at Sorry, you need javascript to view this email address.